A federal judge in San Jose heard arguments on 21 October 2026 in the lyrics case that Universal, Concord and ABKCO brought against Anthropic, and she did not rule from the bench. Judge Eumi Lee had competing requests for summary judgment before her. The question at the centre was whether the new lyrics Claude writes, after being trained on the publishers' human-written songs, weaken the market for the originals, which is one of the key factors in deciding fair use.
The publishers built their argument on scale. They pointed to nearly 120,000 requests for "synthetic lyrics" within a six-month period and said such output hurts both music publishing and streaming. They also said Anthropic's refusal to license material for training damages the emerging market for AI licences. Their lawyer, Matthew Oppenheim, told the court that Claude's scale was what mattered, a remark reported through Law360. Complete Music Update noted that Anthropic is reported to have around 30 million weekly users, which makes 120,000 requests look fairly modest next to that base.
“there isn't anything in the record that shows doom for the music industry”
Sonal Mehta, lawyer for Anthropic, at the hearing, as reported by Complete Music Update · completemusicupdate.com ↗
Anthropic's lawyer, Sonal Mehta, replied that nothing in the evidence shows harm to licensing, or to lyric services such as LyricFind and Genius. She also pointed out that Universal has told its own investors that AI is a net positive for it. Anthropic's wider position, as Lawyer Monthly relays it, is that training is transformative: it builds general capabilities in the model rather than producing substitutes for any one song.
The judge seemed to be looking for concrete evidence of dilution, and Complete Music Update says the publishers have not really supplied it. That outlet also argues that the point is harder to prove for text lyrics than for the music made by Suno and Udio, which compete directly with human recordings for streaming royalties.
CMU's Anthropic graphic that heads its report on the hearing
Image: Complete Music Update
The suit dates from 2023. A judge later refused to let the publishers amend it to take in pirated source books, so they filed a second suit earlier this year, and that one was not argued at this hearing. In the earlier Meta and Anthropic cases brought by book authors, judges accepted fair use with caveats, and the Meta judge said market dilution could defeat it.
Each side, then, framed the other's evidence as the weak point. The publishers want the court to treat Anthropic's refusal to license training material as a harm in its own right, while Anthropic says neither the licensing market nor the lyric platforms show any sign of damage. The judge's wish for hard proof of dilution is what the motions now turn on, as CMU describes the hearing.
About Anthropic
Anthropic has dealt with the music publishers' lyrics case before the summary-judgment stage. Before the court ruled on the publishers' request for a preliminary injunction, the two sides agreed that Anthropic would keep the guardrails it already had on its current models and products.
On 25 March 2025 the judge then denied that injunction, calling it overbroad and hard to enforce, and finding no irreparable harm, since the reputational evidence concerned Claude's outputs that the guardrails already covered and the market-harm claims were speculative. The next day she granted Anthropic's motion to dismiss the contributory and vicarious infringement claims and the claim over removed copyright information, giving the publishers leave to amend.
2021
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Models on AIPopDB
Judge Lee's decision on the summary judgment motions is still to come.
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